The coolest and scariest part of this conference project is that there is hardly anything written on comedian’s relationship with Twitter. This process of acquiring information is extensive and annoying because there is a finite amount of information on this particular topic. Rather than just obtaining facts from articles or previous research, I have to acquire information myself. This is often difficult when you are gaining information from behind a computer screen/mobile phone, as opposed to doing field work- one might argue, particularly in this course, perhaps research behind a phone is field work, but we won’t get into that. Although the articles and research I have garnered, the commonalities, so far, is that comedians either find it immensely useful or exceptionally destructive. What I find interesting about the majority of the articles and research are written by other comedians who find the Twitter space fascinating, either for the better or worse.
For example blogger and comedian Jonas Polsky wrote an article on his Tumblr entitled, Why Twitter Is Bad For Comedy Writing, he states that he, like many other comics, first found the social media medium helpful and easy to use. Once he was asked to help run the TwitteR handle @bestofcomics, a Twitter handle that retweets material from comedians, he found the social media site as harms comedians. He saw himself writing cheap jokes and the majority of his tweets became structurally first person. He sees it as a monkey see monkey do affect. If you ingest awful material, you will produce awful material, Jonas claims. You become accustomed to the particular tone and language, other Twitter users have come to enjoy, you tend to write post in the same manner-hence hindering your creativity. Polsky counties to say that the bar for comedy is set low on Twitter.
Throughout the blog post Jonas Polsky doesn’t seem to think that Twitter is the greatest opponent to comedy. He doesn’t present himself as being a self-important comedy fascist, but he presents himself as an inexperienced user who sees his flaws and is asking for change for himself and other comedians. He asks comedians to be more creative and original when producing content on Twitter. The possibility for joke writing is endless. But if you don’t try to create something original, Twitter will become a legion of boring comedy clones, and the audience will disappear. As well, we place responsibility on the audience members/ followers of comedians. He asks them not to simply favorite or retweet post simply because you like the person, but hold them up to a certain standard because they are a popular comedian. Jonas Polsky tone is one of high regards towards comedy. And he wants to keep it that way. He wants more from comedians on Twitter. Although, Polsky’s tone changes after he writes a follow up post entitled, Rest In Peace Twitter Comedy. He discusses how readers are sick of Twitter comedy and he accepts the end of comedic humor on social media and re-states in his first blog post that As it turned out, Twitter was horrible for comedy writing.
For instance in Judy Berman’s FLAVORWIRE post, 10 Greatest Comedians Who Aren’t Funny on Twitter, Berman takes, well, 10 great comedian’s Twitter post and he explains why they are not funny on the social media site. Although most of her judgements are highly opinionated, she does make a good case on perhaps why some comedian’s find it difficult to translate their humor on the 140 Character playground. As the article opens Berman offers a rhetorical justification for the comedian’s difficulty with Twitter. “Whether they’re saving their material for paying gigs, have other social media concerns outside of entertaining us, or just can’t translate what they do on stage to the Internet, they just aren’t making us laugh.” Berman analyzes the comedian’s difficulty with tone and the lack of performance on Twitter, as she discusses Todd Barry’s tweet, “his live comedy routine is one of our favorites. But, as with Seinfeld, there’s something missing on Twitter. Barry’s act relies on his low, almost creepy voice and slow (yet always well-timed) delivery. In his tweets, like the one above, you can practically hear how he would deliver the joke onstage, but the words themselves aren’t funny enough to make us laugh.”
Both Polsky and Berman make the argument that Twitter is not a useful tool for a comedian. But I don’t think that is entirely true. Twitter is neither good or bad for a comedian I believe it is simply a device to raise the voice of a comedians to a larger audiences. Twitter is a new medium that comedy is expanding, as much as anyone can with a 140 Character limit.
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